IIRC, it was for cold storage of food staples. It’s easier/cheaper to keep a basement surrounded by earth at a consistent cool-to-cold temperature, and that’s very handy for keeping staples shelf-stable. Especially useful for apples, potatoes, and other stuff that would deteriorate much more quickly in warmer environments.
(ETA - bolding added by me)
Frostline means the depth below which the ground never freezes. In northern climates (like Canada) this can be 3 feet down or more.
(In the swampy northern tundra there is the phenomenon of “perma-frost” where due to the insulating properties of the surface crud, there is a frozen layer several feet to hundred feet deep. In these locales, the problem is the oppostie - build a warm structure or put extra piles of dirt like a road over an area of permafrost and it can start to get soft and mushy in that area. Buildings are put on piles or stilts to prevent thawing. Roads heave and sink often.)
Ice expands unlike most solids, from freezing to about 0F. This can cause heaves; another phenomemon is that rocks can slowly make their way to the surface, as frost underneath pushes them up then dirt washes down under and stops them from settling down. In places like Ireland and New England, regularly collecting and clearing the rocks that surface every spring has given us those delightful rock walls around fairly large farmers’ fields. The danger is that this same phenomenon can happen to foundations Frozen ground will rise, recently melted dirt will be mushy.
Since frost can heave, to prevent a house from shifting unevenly, the foundations have to be set on firm soil at the layer where soil does not move during the winter freeze/thaw. Hence the mention above of foundations “well below the frost line”. In softer soils, piles or extra wide footings may still be required.
To add a state, I grew-up in Texas, DFW area, and nobody had a basement. Well, I knew one person who had a basement. But they had a fancy custom home and special french drains, and they still had occasional problems with ground water. Coincidentally, that was also the only Nielsen family I ever met.
Yet, here in Ohio, nearly every home has a basement or crawlspace. Cheaper construction does skip the basement.
Basements are pretty rare in other parts of the South, as well. We lived in North Carolina, quite some distance from any swampy land (we were in Chapel Hill, pretty much the middle of the state), the water table was not, to my knowledge, an issue, and basements were pretty much unheard-of.
Our house was not on a slab, but on a concrete foundation with a crawlspace underneath the house itself.
Anyway, I’d buy that it’s because of the digging below the frost line - less of a need to do so, so no basements.
I’ve never seen a house in Houston with a basement. (I have traveled up to Yankeeland.) The concept of “frost line” is meaningless here. But not the concept of “flash flood.”
Possibly some very high end swankiendas have basements…
Thank you for alleviating my ignorance. Those explanations make perfect sense.
They also confirm my choice of home location. When I moved to my present residence from Miami I told friends that I was moving “100 miles closer to the Arctic Circle than I ever planned to live”. Truly, ice belongs in a glass of tea, not under my house or, og forbid, scattered around all over the place in piles of little crystals.
I live in Orlando and it is lousy with lakes and ponds. Just about every subdivision ends up with a retention pond to keep the houses from flooding. People end up with bigger garages instead of basements. I see a lot of people with two car garages that end up parking all their cars in the driveway.
I’ve read about custom built houses having basements, but they usually end up on high spots and they spend more money on waterproofing.
In addition to the high GWT, there’s also the problem of sinkholes. Most of Florida, from about central FL northward, and huge chunks of south Georgia & Alabama sit on top of what’s called The Florida Karst. It’s basically a foundation of very porous and holey limestone through which water filters and is eventually dissolved by. Sinkholes start because excessive water (like rain from a hurricane, or you know, just some afternoon showers) dissolve enough limestone that a tiny cave forms underground. North Florida is full of sinkholes and caves.
I would be extremely wary of trying to dig a basement in Florida if you’re building a house that’s going to be sitting on top of the limestone karst. You could start a sinkhole that could swallow half the block!
It’s too swampy here and where it isn’t swampy, the land is sitting on top of limestone karst, just waiting to be dissolved to form more sinkholes.
My house is 18" off grade, on a foundation of brick pillars. Houses here are either that, or on concrete slabs.
Here’s a little map. If you’re house isn’t sitting on top of limestone karst, then you are at too low an elevation to dig a basement.
Oh yes, I’d forgotten about sinkholes. When I was a kid, it was big excitement one morning when the neighbors’ new pond swallowed most of their back yard, plus the patio, the porch, and the den! (We live/d about 60 miles due west of Savannah, Georgia.)
And speaking of Savannah, the city recently restored one of the historic squares, and built underground parking beneath. Construction was a logistical nightmare, thanks to the limestone plus a few centuries’ worth of unmapped drainpipes, causing cracks and foundation problems in dozens of surrounding buildings, and the drainage had to be ridiculously over-engineered. My mother, ever the optimist, refers to the Ellis Square garage as the world’s largest municipal swimming pool. I can’t wait for the first heavy duty tropical storm…
Eek on sinkholes. A friend’s cousin decided to save money when purchasing home insurance - and declined the rider for sinkhole coverage.
They regretted it.
To each their own. I personally prefer to live in an area where the yearly freeze kills off the bugs and keeps them bug sized vs. letting them grow year round until they are small animal sized. :eek:
What, you don’t like the Palmetto Bug Rodeo? 
Ever seen the bugs in (summertime) Alaska?
We used to tell a “big mosquitoes” joke (all right, not necessarily a good joke) about two guys camping in the Everglades who heard the mosquitoes talking outside their tent at night. One bug asked, referring of course to the campers, “Shall we eat them here, or carry them across the slough and eat them there?” To which the other replied “Here. If we go carrying them around, the big boys will take them away from us.” Har har, hee hee.
Once I visited my brother at an air force base in far northern Maine. He claimed that when he was first stationed there he knew there was a swing set in the kids’ playground because he could see the top bar above the snow. But he claims he didn’t find out there were see-saws until July. The locals put their own spin on big bug jokes. They claim that a Maine mosquito landed on the runway once and the ground crews ran out and pumped 40,000 pounds of JP4 into it before they realized it wasn’t an aircraft needing fuel.
So where exactly do we find this freezing cold place with shy, inoffensive, retiring bugs? I may visit – but I’m keeping my whip and my chair. 
You almost cost me a new keyboard (note I am a Floridian so I know whereof you speak).
The Ernest Hemingway House on Key West (of all places) has a basement. According to Wiki:
Calgary - we have hardly any bugs here. We barely even get mosquitoes in summer (well, we get a few, but nothing like other places). Plus, summer nights are cool so you can sleep. 
ETA: We don’t have rats here, either!
Come to think of it, I’ve lived in South Carolina most of my life and except for my mom’s family’s houses in Pittsburgh (and only one of those has a real basement, really a cellar that isn’t finished at all - the others are daylight basements) I have never been in a private home with a basement. Also that if you type “basement” enough it starts to look really, really weird.
Sweet! I’ll be right up. What are we having for dinner Sunday? You don’t mind if I bring my dog, right? She’s housebroken and quite well behaved.
Wait a minute, it’s a trick! Wiki says “the Museum on the Isle of Mull explains that *kald *and *gart *are similar Old Norse words, meaning *cold *and garden”. I see the weather forecast for the next several days has highs around 5 and lows of -6 or less. Converting those heathen numbers into real temperatures, I note that if I were lounging outside upon an evening it would not be necessary for me to *put *ice into my tea – my tea would in fact *become * ice itself. And so would I!!
Sorry, the appointment’s off.
{Looks out my window at the snow gently falling.} Awww. 
I have this idea about Extreme Vacationing - offering my home up to any southern Dopers who want to experience a REAL winter. 
I might offer a trade, for a few days anyway. I’ve enjoyed previous forays into the Winter Belt. For limited durations – *extremely *limited durations --, that snow stuff is rather lovely.
You promise to provide sufficient fuel (firewood, heating oil, whatever – lest I need to burn furniture or, say, the second floor) to keep my immediate environs above my personal freezing point of about 68 degrees (call it 20 in Canadjun) for the entirety of my visit. I will promise to exterminate from my home and the immediate vicinity (well, at least between the house and the barn, anyway) all of the cockroaches exceeding 6 inches in carapace length, and to provide such chemical weapons as could be used in a direct defense against mosquitoes. Oh, and a home blood transfusion kit, please specify desired blood type in advance.
I suspect the chance of me becoming “snowed in” at your place is probably roughly equal to the odds of your becoming trapped by impassably flooded roads here, so we’re even on that score. The County grades what we euphemistically call “the road” leading to my property about once a week, if it is above water. How does Calgary deal with an over abundance of feathery ice crystals? Store them in people’s basements?
